Sociolinguistics

Published: Thursday, 06 August 2015 10:05

A discipline "Sociolinguistics" is for first-year students (2 semester) of a master’s program. It is studied for 72 hours (2 credit units). It equals 2 ECTS. While mastering the given discipline students are to take an exam.

Course Description:

This course is the study of the relationship between language and society. We will look at variation at all levels of language and how such variation constructs and is constructed by identity and culture. An exploration of attitudes and ideologies about these varieties will be of particular importance to understanding this relationship. We will also consider some of the educational, political, and social repercussions of these sociolinguistic facts.

Sociolinguistics is a move towards studying language performance, and there are two arguments on why this should be studied within language: 1. Language is an interactive and cultural phenomenon which should be studied. 2. Actual language use is highly structured and not at a random. These arguments split into two strands of sociolinguistics: Interactional Sociolinguistics and Variation Theory of Sociolinguistics. This course will provide you with an introduction to the study of language variationand change, a subject that comprises three closely related disciplines: historicallinguistics (the study of how languages change over time); dialectology (the study ofregional variation in language); and sociolinguistics (the study of the relationships betweenlanguage and society). While we will explore all of these subjects and the interactions amongthem, our main emphasis will be on Sociolinguistics, including both correlationalsociolinguistics (how social factors like age, sex and social class influence language) andmany topics in the sociology of language (the role of language in human behavior andsocial organization). Included among the latter are situations of language contact (pidgins &creoles, multilingualism, etc.) and issues related to disciplines as diverse as anthropology,education, gender & cultural studies, politics, social psychology and sociology.

Aims:

The learning goals for this course are:

• to understand and evaluate current work in sociolinguistics;
• to engage first-hand with contemporary sociolinguistics research and writing;
• to recognize major theoretical, methodological and critical approaches in sociolinguistics.